Hennessey: A Shark Novella, Part 1: Migrant

She idled northward eating the miles with slow beats of her crescent tail. Water flowed through her open mouth and out her throat, past gills that sampled its equatorial warmth, through nostrils that tasted its stories. Everything that moved in the sea around her left thin traces, and all of them were amply known to her. Her eyes stared black and still, while her nose, tongue and throat saw a broader array of colors. Flat triangles of pectoral fins and a meaty gray dorsal fading stylishly to black cut a shape with thirty million years of credibility. Gunmetal gray on top, pristine underbelly. “White Shark” was the word-paring anyone would use to describe her, but what she represented was far older than language.

She was utterly sure of her supremacy. Her kind had seen the tides of mass extinction swell and recede, watched the world live and die and live again. Yet her kind survived, swimming beside death as witness and partner. In an ocean of tumult sharks endured.

Where she swam today the shallow ocean was green with life, charged with the earthy discharge of Georgia marshes and the phosphorus tang of rivers emptying from Carolina farmlands. For hours she enjoyed the Sun, cruising near the surface with occasional feeding dives. In the dim deep she could sometimes find prey with sufficient fatty bulk to fuel her growth: schools of saucer-like jacks in reflective silver, long-nosed billfish surprised in the dark, and tuna on the best days when her speed could match their silvery frenzy.

She’d followed the continent’s edge northward each summer, cued by rapidly warming water, since reaching 10 feet in length. Bulk had brought its own confidence, along with the physical fortitude needed for sorties farther from shore. And in the north she learned to take small harbor seals, then bigger gray seals and even bigger prey to feed her needs.

When she found them, she struck her prey like all ancient hunters, without worry. She was good at feeding, nothing in the planet’s history ever did it better. The ocean was her limitless hunting ground, a never-ending cycle of life with her and her kin at the top. She wandered the global waters carrying her skill and hunger like a hammer and an anvil. So she accepted her food with no malice and no regret and no tally except the need to feed and grow.

Now, each changing moon brought her closer to the next chapter in her life, and bigger needs. New life grew within her. Midway through her fourth decade, her first brood of pups. Her first heavy weight of life’s responsibility.

But this year’s waters were even barer than last. Prey of all kinds drifted further north each year, fleeing the super-heated summers of the south. Day after day her search in those warmer waters was empty. But day by day, her need for food spiked as her pups grew.

She sliced through the coastal waters, skirting beaches and ships and bays, swallowing little but the miles of her journey, casual with her inborn strength. And with the utter determination of a new mother.